Nobody Rides for Free by Neil S. Plakcy

Author:Neil S. Plakcy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fbi, miami, police, gay, mystery
Publisher: Samwise Books
Published: 2018-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

20 – A Reason for Torture

SHANE’S CONFESSION shook me, and I felt so terrible I couldn’t eat dinner or focus on anything. I went out for a long walk around my darkened neighborhood, looking at the lit windows and wondering what was going on behind them. The sound of air conditioning compressors mixed with someone blasting the soundtrack to Jesus Christ Superstar. An elderly man passed me, walking a goofy-looking labradoodle, whose big head was too large for his long spindly legs.

The man said hello, and I answered him. In the glow of a streetlight, I saw how carefully he’d combed his hair, how neat his clothes were—even for walking his dog—and my gaydar pinged. What had it been like for him to be gay, back when homosexuality was the love that didn’t dare speak its name?

As a teenager, for a long time, I felt like the world was conspiring against me. My dad was dead, and I was never going to have a happy life because I was gay and everyone would hate me if they knew. By the time I got to college, I began to realize how lucky I was, and that so many other kids had it a lot worse.

That feeling only accelerated after I joined the Bureau. Everyone whose arrest I participated in seemed to have been a victim at some point who suffered some horror or loss that had doomed him or her to criminal action. I was fascinated by the background research I read as each time I tried to establish the turning point that had led to this activity.

I thought about taking some online courses in sociology, because I was so curious about the patterns I saw. I also began to understand myself more, recognizing my reaction to my dad’s death and the responsibility of looking after Danny as my mom struggled to take care of us. I analyzed his behavior, too. Had I spoiled him? Had I doomed him to a life in which he expected someone else to make big decisions for him? And might that lead him to fall in with people who didn’t have his best interests at heart?

My stomach finally stopped churning after I’d exhausted myself, and I ate a salad and went to bed.

≈≈≈

Wednesday morning I felt better, but I was still haunted by Shane’s story. It made me even more determined to rescue Ozzy and Dimetrie—to do for them what those good foster parents and college counselors had done for Shane.

When I got to work on Wednesday morning I called Colin Hendricks at the DEA. I reminded him of how I’d seen Dimetrie go into that house in Wilton Manors, and that the evening before I’d seen Ozzy Perez there, too. “The best I can do is go to that address and talk to the guys there,” he said. “You said the guy’s a porn performer, so I don’t trust anything he wrote in an e-mail. And we have no evidence that there are drugs on the premises at this time.

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